Our faculty research projects include the role of craft labor in the production of mass media; the role of cartography, surveillance images, and art in imagining borders; the relationship of digital voice-activated assistants, AI, and racialized domestic servitude; the aesthetics of marvel and astonishment in early cinema; the gangster genre; new media in Beijing; iconicity in South Asian cinema.
The department is home to two important film journals: Feminist Media History (Jennifer Bean, ed.) and The Journal of Chinese Cinemas (Yomi Braester, ed.). Recent faculty publications have included journal articles on media infrastructures, streaming video, artificial intelligence, surveillance technologies, domestic servitude and voice-activated assistants, and Latinx digital art.
Recent dissertations have explored a wide range of topics including Hindi cinema, citizenship, and the law; the career of Japanese filmmaker Oshima Nagisa; justice and the image during the Cultural Revolution; gender and cinema in early 20th Century Paris; postsocialist cinema and television in China; Croatian animation; and orientalism and racialization in interwar American film.
